Munidat "Raj" Persaud, is pictured in his flight school's website. Persaud died Saturday after his plane crashed off Long Island. Authorities are still searching for two other passengers. (Provided by Oxford Flight Training website)

The bodies of the owner of a small plane that crashed in the ocean south of Long Island and those of his two passengers had been recovered Sunday night by the U.S. Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard recovered the body of Munidat “Raj” Persaud, 47, of Waterbury, on Saturday, not long after his twin-engine Piper PA-34 fell into the Atlantic just before noon, about three miles offshore from West Hampton Beach. On Sunday, the Coast Guard found the bodies of the passengers, who were not immediately identified, in the plane’s fuselage, which had settled in about 20 feet of water, a spokesman said.

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One was a man, the other was a woman, according to the New York State Police.

The plane took off from Oxford-Waterbury Airport, stopped briefly at nearby Danbury Airport, then began a flight to Charleston Executive Airport in Charleston, S.C. when witnesses on Long Island said its engines sounded as if they were sputtering and it fell into the water.

The search was scaled back after dark Saturday, but two Coast Guard boats prowled the area overnight, searching for the plane’s fuselage. On Sunday morning, divers were using sonar to narrow the search area, combing the ocean floor for irregularities that could indicate the missing fuselage or the passengers themselves, said Petty Officer Steven Strohmaier, a spokesman for the Coast Guard.

Persaud founded and owned Oxford Flight Training, a flight school registered at the airport from which the Piper plane took off on Saturday, according to a neighbor who knew Persaud and his family for 15 years.

Mark St. John, who lives across the street from the Persauds in Waterbury, said two city police officers came to the family’s home Saturday night to tell them Persaud was dead.

St. John sat with them that night. “There’s a lot of different words in different faiths for what it was, but I just wanted to sit there and commiserate with them,” he said. On Sunday, he picked up Persaud’s older daughter from the University of New Haven.

“The kids are putting on a brave front, but it’s a numbing kind of thing,” he said.

A woman answered the phone for the Oxford flight school on Sunday, but said she was in no state to speak to a reporter and hung up.

Persaud was a former commercial pilot and flight engineer, working for airlines such as Pan American World Airways, according to the flight school’s website. Several Piper PA-34 planes — the type of plane that crashed Saturday — were among the 18 aircraft registered to him, federal aviation records show.

Earlier this year, he had registered a second flight school, Danbury Flight Training, filing paperwork with the secretary of the state on Jan 25.

Like everyone else, St. John was left to wonder: Who were the plane’s two missing passengers? Why did it stop at Danbury Airport, just 30 miles from the Oxford airport from which it departed?

“I’m not a conspiracy guy, but some things don’t add up,” he said. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

The plane hit the water at about 11:40 a.m., about three miles south southeast of the Francis S. Gabreski Airport in Westhampton Beach, N.Y., Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Jim Peters said via email.

The search began shortly before noon Saturday when witnesses on the south shore of Long Island, near the Hamptons, saw a plane crash into the Atlantic Ocean off the village of Quogue. They alerted authorities and a search began.

The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will work together to determine the probable cause for the accident, said Peters, the FAA spokesperson.

Alisa D. Sisic, a public information officer for the Connecticut Airport Authority, confirmed that the flight originated in the Oxford-Waterbury Airport, which is in Oxford. But she had no other details.

Several agencies aided in the search for the missing passengers: The Coast Guard, Suffolk County Marine Unit and East Hampton bay constables had boats on the scene Sunday, along with a commercial salvage boat. East Hampton had deployed a helicopter.

Surfers who were on the beach said they saw the plane “sputtering and crashing into the ocean,” according to Kevin Raynor, a third assistant chief for the Westhampton Beach Fire Department.

Reports from the New York Daily News and Newsday are included. Courant staff writer Edmund H. Mahony contributed.